


Different ways to say "I love you"

by Catherine_Nightingale



Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Denial, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Romance, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-06 06:45:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13405668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherine_Nightingale/pseuds/Catherine_Nightingale
Summary: Soulmate AU, where the soulmark on your skin is the first love confession you're gonna hear from your soulmate. And it's almost never the simple "I love you"...





	1. Javi

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gwrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwrites/gifts).



Javi’s soulmark becomes fairly visible just after he turns five. He really shouldn’t try to decipher it right away, it’s too early for him, but he can’t control his curiosity at this point in life, and that’s why Javier is sitting in the barn and holds a mirror close to his chest, trying to make sense of the multitude of little letters. He is able to make out only a couple of them - his mark starts with an ‘O’ and has several ‘t’’s in it, and also an ‘I’, a ‘b’ and a ‘d’. Javi strains his eyes for a long time, but the letters are too small, and eventually, he gives up and falls backward into the hay, looking at the ceiling and trying to imagine the whole phrase. 

Well, at least, he decides, it’s not a plain “I love you” for sure. That would be really stupid.

 

The day of his ninth birthday Javi hides in that same barn and finally reads the whole phrase. It’s still too early for many kids his age, but Javier’s soulmate apparently has a very interesting handwriting, with thick lettering and almost block letters, so the phrase marking Javi’s ribs is perfectly visible, even in the dim light.

_“Oh, it’s not me I’m worried about.”_

Javier rewinds the phrase a few times in his head and wonders what kind of adventures he and his soulmate are gonna be up to, that this is the first love confession he’s going to get.

At least, Javi hopes that those will be adventures, and not something boring. Boring life sucks.

 

Waiting for the soulmate to come into your life can be tiring, and there are a lot of non-soulmate relationships and even marriages out there - life goes on, and sometimes soulmates are not destined to meet until they are old, and sometimes soulmates die before meeting each other, and the human race wouldn’t have survived, if all relationships were limited to soulmate ones. So, when his girlfriend tells him that they should get married, that doesn’t surprise Javi. What does surprises him is an acute ache piercing his heart and splashing across his ribs, burning the words on his skin. 

He goes along with the wedding anyway - if Loraine wants to get married, she should, he has no real reason to protest, it’s a logical step, it’s not like they are eighteen anymore, and she gets most of the stuff related to his work with the DEA, and she is beautiful and sweet - he couldn’t have found a better person to spend his life with even if he wanted to. He tells this to himself all that time they prepare for the wedding, trying to ignore the ache of his mark, and by the time he rushes to the car with his best mate, Javier almost believes himself, that marrying Loraine is the right choice.

He stops the car anyway.

A year and a half later, standing over the mutilated corpse of some poor Colombian guy, who chose lead over silver, Javi finally forgives himself, and bitterly hopes to never meet his soulmate. Not at least until he gets out of this hell’s pit, which is not going to be soon, if ever. Whoever they are, they don’t deserve to see this hell.

 

There are ways to conceal the mark if one doesn’t want it to be seen. There are body paints, and special bands, and other stuff. Javi personally knew a kid, who tattooed a few other lines around his mark, making it indiscernible. 

But Javi himself never hides his mark, doesn’t see the point, it’s not on his hands, or on the face or neck, and not visible most of the time, hiding it further is needless effort.

“Have you ever met them?” Helena asks once, when they’re lying in his bed, cuddling - she is a real cuddler, which is a rarity for a prostitute. Maybe, that is one of the reasons Javi likes her so much. She traces his Mark with her slender fingers. “Your soulmate?”

“No, not yet,” he answers and reaches for the cigarettes to stop himself from thinking once again about the possibility, that his soulmate might be here of all places. That one day his mark might become pale and then disappear without a trace. 

“Maybe it’s for the best,” Helena says softly, her gaze becoming distant. “Losing someone is worse than never knowing them at all.”

Her mark says “Please, beauty, let me help” in English in gentle scrawl across her left clavicle, and Javi can see why she chooses to believe that. 

 

And Javi really wants to agree with Helena, really wants to adopt that rather cynical view from her, but sometimes, not knowing what exactly you’re losing doesn’t make it easier. And when a few weeks later his chest flares up and his mark turns dull grey instead of black, he almost loses it. He doesn’t care, that he never knew, who his soulmate is, he just prays wordlessly to whatever entity there is to not let them die. 

After a few very painful moments, his mark becomes normal black again, and Javi’s knees almost give out with relief. His soulmate is out of danger, at least for now, and for a long and really selfish moment, Javi wishes they could be with him, wishes he could protect them. He drops the thought immediately, upon realizing how ridiculous it sounds - here of all places it’ll be a miracle if he manages to protect himself - but the idea clings to the back of his mind and never really goes away.

 

A few weeks later Javier meets his new partner and wonders, absentmindedly, how long this one will stay, how much he’s prepared to endure and exactly how far he’s willing to go to keep up with the investigations.

And Steve Murphy never disappoints.


	2. Steve

Steve can’t make out a single letter of his mark for so long, he becomes extremely worried he might never be able to do it. At seven he once spends more than an hour, looking in the mirror at a dark thin mish-mash of what’s supposed to be letters, and dreads the possible futures. What if his soulmate can’t speak? Is there even a way for mutes to confess their love? What if...

The countless possibilities, from stupid to fantastical run through Steve’s head, leaving him more and more frustrated, until he gives up and stomps out of the room, kicking the furniture on the way out. This soulmate stuff is stupid, he decides. He doesn’t want a soulmate anymore. He can survive without one. 

 

His resentment keeps up just until a year later, when, waking up in the morning, Steve looks in the mirror and suddenly sees the first letter. It’s ‘D’.  
Steve lets out a whoop of joy, his year-long pretense abandoned, and all but glues himself to the mirror, trying to discover more letters. He gets only one more, the upper-case ‘I’ somewhere in the middle of the sentence (other letters are still too small), but it does nothing to dim his joy. He has a phrase! A whole phrase! It’s just that his soulmate’s handwriting is so messy he wasn’t able to read it before!

Steve runs out of the room shirtless and parades like that around the apartment until mom tells him to dress up. Steve does so, reluctantly. He wants to tell the whole world about his newfound belief in his soulmate, whoever they may be, and love burns under his skin. He knows that it doesn’t work like that, but Steve hopes, frantically, that his soulmate is able to feel it too. 

 

Steve is eleven when one day he gets home from school and, the moment he gets to his room, his soulmark flares up painfully, making him clutch his chest and double over in pain. As soon as he’s able to move, Steve tears at his shirt until he can see the mark, and it’s dull grey, ashen, and he realizes, with a sinking feeling, that his soulmate is in grave danger.

The floor slips out from under the boy’s feet and he falls over, crying silently with pain and fear, and tries to pray for his soulmate to survive, at least this once, but his prayer is nothing but a stream of garbled words. 

It takes a couple of minutes for the pain to disappear, but Steve spends a bit more time on the floor, sobbing, now in relief. When he finally gets up, sniffling and angrily wiping away the tears and snot, and glances into the mirror, his mark is dark again and - finally - fully readable. It takes Steve around a minute to decipher it backward, but he manages and realizes, for the first time in his short life, the true meaning of word “irony”.

_“Do you think that I would do that to you?”_ says his mark in a rather messy but somehow gentle handwriting, and Steve hiccups a laugh. 

“You already did,” he says aloud, though of course, his soulmate won’t hear him. Steve doesn’t care. 

What he cares about is not telling anyone of what happened, and not getting into serious trouble anymore. No one deserves to be in such pain, and if he can help it, Steve vows to himself, he’ll keep his soulmate out of it. 

 

Steve keeps his promise in the years to come. Sure, he never covers the cowardice up with it, never backs down from a noble cause or fight, but if there’s a choice, he tries to settle with the safest option, developing a strong sense of self-preservation mixed with a hard moral code by the time he’s eighteen. 

Steve’s soulmate though… it feels like their life is filled with danger, or that they just don’t know when to stop and back down. Death follows them closely, if the burning and palling of Steve’s mark is any indication, and he’s tired of getting scared for them by the time the prom night rolls in. He ignores the pain in his chest as long as he can until his dance partner asks why is he crying and Steve is at loss for words. He can’t really explain that it’s tears of fear - the fear of his soulmate dying before Steve even gets a chance to meet them, much less fall in love with them, that crawled into his mind again and sunk it’s cold claws in. 

Steve manages to make up some stupid excuse for tears, trying and almost succeeding to sound casual, smiles at his partner and continues dancing. That’s all he can do.

 

By the time Steve meets Connie, he’s already resigned himself to losing his soulmate. And Connie, smart and beautiful as she is, is ideal for him, and what is more, she understands his soulmate situation perfectly. 

“Mine is often in danger too,” she says softly when he explains everything to her, showing him her collarbone. 

Across it, in a bit childlike handwriting, written _“You’re not so bad yourself, gringo girl”_ and it’s grey instead of black, and Steve can’t help but trace it with his fingers. 

“It hurts like hell” Connie confesses almost inaudibly, eyes tearful, and Steve’s heart breaks for her.

“Yeah, it does,” he agrees and kisses her tears away.

They get married the way a lot of non-soulmate couples marry - quiet and with a written down agreement to split amicably if they ever find their respective soulmates, though both of them don’t believe that’ll ever be the case.

 

Going to Colombia is the most irrational and dangerous decision in Steve’s life, but frankly, he doesn’t care. He’s just lost his partner and best friend for nothing, and, to make matters worse, his freaking murderer walked out free! Steve demands to be transferred to Colombia as soon as he learns that La Quica’s bail was met. He briefly tries to convince Connie to stay out of it, but she’s adamant to follow him even in that hell and that adds to Steve’s resolve.

He thinks of his soulmate while boarding the plane to Bogota, and hopes they can forgive him. But he’s done keeping to the safest option.


End file.
